No Accounting
by LadieLazarus
Summary: A pleasant afternoon in London. Pryde/Wisdom


Title:

Fandom: X-men

Pairing: Pryde/Wisdom

Rating:

Prompt: 039 Taste

"All I'm saying is that if you finally get a would-be assassin pinned to your car and ready to talk, you _don't _let him get a cyanide pill out of his fucking cigarette and put it in his mouth."

"I just can't believe we watched the whole movie, and that's your only problem with it." Kitty shook her head, leaning over a booth in Brighton's North Laines to look at a pair of gloves. "I'm not even a spy and I had more problems than that."

"Look, Pryde, if we're going to go into all of that we'll never talk about anything else, and I like talking to you about happy things that are not James Bond movies, and there is absolutely no way I'm giving that guy six quid for a pair of fucking gloves that anyone could make." Pete shook his head, taking them out of her hands and tossing them onto the table.

"But I like them." Kitty picked them up again. She looked at the supposed salesmen, a disillusioned looking kid in a baseball hat, leafing through the pages of The Argus, the cover of which featured Excalibur blazing into battle victoriously. Kitty smiled. "Excuse me, is there any chance you'd take 4 pounds for these instead?"

The kid lifted his eyes from the paper.

"Sure. Whatever." He shrugged, seemingly as disinterested in selling the gloves as he had been in his paper only a moment ago. Kitty smiled and handed the coins over, turning to Wisdom smugly.

"See? It pays to be nice once in a while." Kitty pulled her new gloves onto slender hands before taking Pete's hand in hers.

They strolled, together, to the next booth where they both quickly became involved in a search through a vast library of second-hand books.

"Hey, Pete." Kitty called out from the end of one of the long tables. Pete turned, walking towards her until he could read the title of the book in her hand, at which point he quickly turned and moved back to his previous location. "I'm going to buy it for you, since you enjoyed the movie so much."

"Go right ahead. I'll burn it in effigy." Pete shrugged, picking up a copy of John Fowle's _The Magus_, placing it off to the side for further consideration. Kitty, who had moved down to his end of the table by now, added the aforementioned 'present', a dog-eared paperback copy of Ian Fleming's _Dr. No_, on the stack along with a hardcover edition of _Good Omens,_ and a leather-bound collection of H.P. Lovecraft.

"You won't really burn it will you, Pete? After I bought it for you?" She was teasing now, batting her eyelashes, and grinning.

"You're going to pay a pound for it." Pete shrugged, adding a couple of random tomes on various Eastern cultures onto the stack. "You were going to spend that same pound, plus one of its mates, on a bloody pair of gloves a moment ago."

"I happen to like this book."

"You've read it before?" Pete turned to her incredulously. "I knew it. You're only dating me because I'm a spy, aren't you? You're a Op Groupie."

Kitty sniggered, counting the books in their joint collection, to assess the damage.

"Oh, you're on to me, Wisdom. That's the only reason I crawled into bed with your sorry ass." Her tone darkened slightly, and Pete wondered if she had stopped kidding now. "I just couldn't resist all of the secrets, the lies, the possibilities that you were sleeping with other operatives in order to sell this cover or that one." She shook her head.

Suddenly, she let out a squeak of surprise as he grabbed her wrist, spinning her away from the table and up against a convenient brick storefront. He leaned down, without preamble, and kissed her roughly, threading his fingers in her thick brown curls and not letting up until he felt her relax entirely into the embrace.

"Pryde, trust me, regardless of what those piece of crap movies and books have to say, I do only what I have to do. I'm not going to lie and say that sex has never been part of it in the past, and that it won't be in the future, but I will tell you that it hasn't happened since we started, and if it happens in the future, it'd be as a last resort to keep myself alive so I could get myself back to you in one piece."

"And you'd tell me, right?" Kitty's eyes looked straight through him. "If that happened. Even if it were part of a cover?"

Pete felt his heart melt. Even if he had been planning to lie to her about this, he couldn't have after that.

"Of course I would, Pryde. Don't be ridiculous." He kissed her quickly, as if suddenly embarrassed to be so emotionally forthright in public, and turned, pulling her along behind him. "Now, let's see how much of my hard-earned money these books are going to rob me of. I'll even buy you your horrible book."

"You're too kind." Kitty snorted.

"Well, I love you." Pete shrugged, handing the books, and the money over to the lady on the other side. As she placed the books in a plastic Tesco's bag, Pete slung his arm over Kitty's shoulder, pulling her into his side. "I guess there's just no accounting for taste."


End file.
